For example, while I was waxing philosophically to myself while walking to my car in Oxford, I was also planning to possibly murder whoever was behind attacking me in Los Angeles. The myself that existed back in Brockton Bay would have been aghast at the thought of murder, but she would have approved of the idea of thwarting someone attempting to bully me.
She just never had the power-no, I just never thought I had any power to stop it. The truth was, now that I could look back with the benefit of hindsight, I had many different ways to stop the Trio from bullying me. I had just been so lost in my own despair and self-loathing to realise it. I still couldn't believe Sophia Hess had been a fucking Ward, though. Talk about not trusting cops.
As for my new "bully",... Well, I had a suspect, but the only thing I had learned from him was a list of his fetishes and what type of joytoys he liked bringing home-all things that I could have gone my whole life without knowing. I had thought that he would be stupid enough to plan any extracurricular attacks on me at his home, but as far as I could tell, he had not. It really was a shame when enemies failed to be as stupid as you hoped, even if I never relied on those hopes.
That meant either he was smart enough to keep plans elsewhere if this was a personal vendetta, Dynacorp as a whole was after me, and he only discussed plans at work, or it was a third party. It appeared clear it was a kidnapping attempt rather than a straight hit, as fire wasn't directed at my vehicle until I started to escape.
I wondered how they had planned to run off with me because any party that could organise this would have known I had Platinum coverage at Trauma Team. Rather than secret, these things were public knowledge as a Platinum subscription tended to stop a lot of minor assaults and attacks before they even happened.
It wasn't impossible to kidnap someone who had a Trauma subscription, even if it was Platinum, but it was a lot harder than it sounded. The AV-4s were equipped with advanced electronic warfare equipment. You could jam the frequency range the transponder used, but the AV-4 would just home in on your jammer and fall from heaven on you like an ACME-brand anvil.
I thought that the normal way would be for a netrunner to hijack the victim's operating system and, through software, disable both the biomonitor and transponder, but anyone doing a little research on Dr Hasumi would find her fifteen minutes of fame, where I was recorded passively surviving a sophisticated virus attack and punching the netrunner in the face, so my cybersecurity wouldn't be underestimated.
A very heavily shielded van, perhaps? Where radio-frequencies would not penetrate? That would work and wouldn't be too difficult to set up.
The way I would do it would rapid surgery to physically disable the biom. I could do it in less than a minute, but while I had to admit this was possible, it seemed like the least plausible of all possibilities.
I sent a message to both my Militech point-of-contact regarding this contract; this was a different person than my sales rep, as well as Kiwi. I wanted an investigation into who was responsible. That was an upsell service, like adding a small apple pie with your value meal at an additional charge. But I wanted Kiwi to take part because I didn't entirely trust Militech to tell me everything they found out, even if I was paying them to.
After that, I just relaxed for a time and let them unload me from the AV-4 like a sack of potatoes and take me into the bright white of the fancy corporate trauma centre. I was paying almost half a million Eurodollars a year for this service and about the same again for the Militech bodyguards, and that wouldn't even include the entire fees for this visit, so I expected to at least get my money's worth.
November 2066
Night City
Taylor's Apartment
"Man, your pet bird is boxed, Doc T," said Hiro, the little boy, less little now. I had hired him to feed Mrs Pegpig daily while I was gone and clean her cage, which she rarely used anyway. He also sometimes worked shifts as a clerk in my front pharmacy-clinic area. The boy had shot up like a weed compared to the last time I had seen him years ago, and while he had dropped out of school ("School's for gonks, lady!"), which I didn't approve of; he at least wasn't falling into being a total delinquent.
Apparently, he had tested out of school, which was not very difficult. He still ran a number of side hustles, including the courier business that I had first met him doing. One of his other ventures was almost a direct competitor to me in that he would buy a lot of pharmaceuticals wholesale from me, and he sold them to his delivery customers, both to people who didn't want to bother coming to my store as well as marketing them to the people he did deliveries for. Kind of like, "You wanted a gun? How about some MaxDoc trauma medicine, too?"
He basically had a little store without a physical storefront. It was a good hustle, and I didn't mind that he was competing with me. I barely marked up the things I sold him and would eventually arrange for him to meet my suppliers once he could speak three sentences without using some sort of hood slang. He still didn't quite understand that the way he talked would filter him out of any real business that wasn't illegal or grey market. The boy seemed to think that I was a expert businesswoman though, as he had asked me to review all of his businesses, as he said he wasn't making as much money as he thought he should. I had agreed before I went to England.
I wasn't running my pharmacy to profit from it anyway; I was just running it so that I could have a plausible thing to do while I relaxed most of the time. I had already decided that if I left the Megabuilding that I would offer to sell him that part of my business, possibly financing it myself, in exchange for a percentage, like a venture capitalist in reverse.
As far as his schooling? It rubbed me the wrong way, but I couldn't really deny that most public schools were a waste of time, either. I thought it was intentional, as a less educated and less sophisticated populace was easier to control. The propaganda on TV and the net was not subtle here, but many people still lapped it up.
However, he kept using words that I am pretty sure he was making up. I wasn't that old not to know all of the slang, and I was pretty sure he just made up "boxed" on the fly. I eyed him and asked for clarification, glancing at Mrs Pegpig, who cooed at me, "What do you mean?"
"After you left, she just sat there, still, like a statue! She only moved to eat," Hiro said, with an amazed look on his face.
I rubbed her head as she cooed and closed her nictitating membranes in pleasure and said, "Awww... she missed me." Hiro looked at me like I was crazy, and he opened his mouth to say something, shaking his head, but I waved him off. I didn't have time to listen about how my bird was eccentric. I already knew that! Mrs Pegpig turned to glare at the boy.
He closed his mouth without saying anything and finally just shrugged, "You know, whatever... Did you look at what I sent you like you promised?"
I nodded slowly. "I did notice a few things. You're not really accounting for the true costs of your enterprise. Mainly your carrying costs are a lot higher than you think because you never sat down to consider how each much it costs to sell each item."
"Carrying costs?" he asked as I sat Mrs Pegpig on my shoulder.
I walked over to make us each a sandwich, "Yes. Carrying cost is the total cost to hold inventory. For example, you are not assigning any value or cost to the area you use as a storehouse, even though you said you paid for it. You aren't assigning any cost to the kids you hire part-time to organise it. You rightfully consider these costs, but you don't quantify them. Worse, you have a ton of dead inventory."
Before he could ask what that meant, I waved a hand, "You sell a lot of perishable goods, like candies and burritos and the like. You mistakenly believe that because you sell a lot of these things, you are making a profit. However, with the excess that you stock to keep a buffer for sudden demand, it means you lose a lot when the goods you keep on hand expire without being sold. I doubt you're even breaking even on this grocery stuff, especially since you don't have a wholesale supplier. It would be cheaper to just do as you used to and just pay your couriers a little more to swing by an Allfoods or a Mark 24 store." It would also prevent his child employees from pilfering burritos from the stock, I thought, which was another large outlay that I didn't even mention.
I hummed, "You should only actually stock and sell items that have a large margin and don't cost too much to store. The rest? Just buy it at the time and deliver it, like you used to. The pharmaceuticals I sell you are a good example."
He frowned, "I thought I was doing pretty well buying and then later selling guns, though, and everyone says the margin on guns is terrible."
I raised an eyebrow, "You aren't selling arms. Someone can go to any gun store on any block and buy a gun. You're selling an untraceable gun right now, delivered. That's a whole different product, really. It's less of a product and more of a service, really, which is your core competency. If you need a gun so bad right now that you have it delivered, then you're going to expect a mark-up. Plus, from what I can tell, you pay very little for the arms you buy."
That most of them were probably used in a crime was left unstated. Why throw a pistol in the Bay after you had to shoot some pimp when you could sell it for a few bucks to some kid who had a steel file and patience? Honestly, it was the most dangerous part of Hiro's little enterprise, and I would have preferred him not to be involved in it at all, but he wasn't one to appreciate anyone telling him what he could and couldn't do. Ever since he bought that first cheap revolver from me, he realised that there was a fair market for guns modified to not have either microstamping technology in the firing pin or even a serial number attached to them.
"Ahh," he said, grinning and nodding while he dug into the sandwich.
As he ate, I said, "You also need to judge better the prices you charge your clients. You charge clients an upfront fee based on their distance, but you pay your couriers based on how many minutes it takes them to make the delivery. They're not really screwing you, but you have no system in place for variable pricing during rush hour or identifying delivery areas that are particularly burdensome for one reason or another." I just shrugged, "You lose money on most deliveries to Kubiki, for example. By distance, it isn't that far, but you have to, on average, change trains two times for most addresses just due to the way the NCART is set up. So the delivery times add up. You need to switch from a pure distance-calculated price to a price based on the historical average delivery times both for that destination and also for that time of day. This means you need to keep many more records and use many more spreadsheets." Or maybe hire a computer nerd to write him some custom software.
This caused the boy to groan in between bites and ask, possibly rhetorically, "Where do you learn this stuff?"
I aimed a gimlet stare at him and carefully enunciated each word, "In. School." Mrs Pegpig cooed at him in disapproval, too, from her perch on my shoulder. To reward her, I gave her a bit of ham that I was using to make my sandwich, which she scarfed down.
"Hah! I know that's a fucking lie!" he crowed, grinning.
His grin turned into a frown as I reached out at super speed and smacked him on top of his hand with the flat of the butter knife I had just wiped off, saying, "Language." I could see him try to yank his hand out of the way, but he moved so slow that it was easy to give him a good smack and watch as he shook his hand in feigned pain. Although I was quick, I didn't actually hit him at more than tap strength.
Still, he wasn't quite wrong. Public schools didn't teach that, but business schools definitely did. I sighed, "I'll send you a list of classes that you can take online. You can't get credit for them, but you can audit their lectures online for free if you're actually interested in learning things that will help you." That was one of the weirdest parts of this world. There really wasn't that much that was secret in terms of base and even specialty education. Even designs of medical nanomachines, granted that they would be two or three generations out of date, were available online in many University archives.
However, the culture and, I suspected, the public school system inoculated the pernicious idea that "You can't change anything, so don't bother bettering yourself or even trying" generation after generation. That was a self-fulfilling prophecy, though. The odds might always be stacked against them, but you definitely couldn't change anything if you were ignorant.
You just couldn't change this world as a shounen protagonist archetype; you had to have some intellectual heft. If you didn't believe that, just look at the fate of all of the actual rockerboys, like the legendary Johnny Silverhand. I didn't think he was dumb, precisely, but I did think it was dumb to expect to sing yourself into a revolution. Revolutions required careful planning and logistics.
And the odds of changing anything were stacked against everyone. Even me. It seemed unlikely that I could change anything in a lasting way, at least as far as the social dynamics were concerned, even with all my advantages. However, I had lived with the default modal programming of "giving up" and "keeping my head down" for as long as I could stand already back in Brockton Bay.
Hiro got a canny look on his face and then nodded.
November 2066
Night City
Night City Health Science Centre
I sat across from the well-dressed man in a similarly well-cut black minidress. As opposed to all of the other dresses I had worn in the past, this had a v-cut and actually showed off some cleavage, as much as I had anyway, and the hem was only to the lower to mid-thigh.
It was something that I would have never agreed to wear prior to spending two years as Dr Hasumi. It was weird how obvious self-loathing was in retrospect, but when I had assumed her identity, it had been obvious to me that Dr Hasumi had been quite pretty. Since I knew she was pretty, it wasn't a weird decision to wear pretty clothes. It wasn't my body, after all.
Spending two years in her skin let me wear things that I would never have agreed to wear as Taylor Hebert, but doing it for long enough had made it a habit.
